Forums >> Revit Building >> Technical Support >> text!

col9000

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Hi,

I'm preparing my first Revit planning application, which usually means lots of explanatory text and pictures. In autocad I used all the text functionality, columns where you can adjust widths etc were very useful. I can't seem to find anything like that in Revit... Any help!?

Thanks

C

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dgcad

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Joined: Thu, Mar 17, 2005
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I dare to say the DWG has the RVT beat as far as mtext / tables / OLE goes.

Perhaps use a 'legend' ? It's like a table where you can have text and graphics in columns like a table.

Another option is to create what you want entirely outside REVIT then turn it into an 'image file' (bmp, jpg, png, tiff, etc) and then import it into REVIT as an 'image file' onto a 'Sheet' or 'Drafting View'.

or

Do it in AutoCAD and then link the DWG into REVIT. That way it is 'linked' and stays up to date.

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MARS1276

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Y'know, I like dgcad's idea; whick, in turn gave me an idea I will have to run by my CAD/BIM manager.  It would be simple to create a callout detail view of your scheduled item (hide the call out of course) and then just place the detail of the item right next to your scheduled info.  That way it would appear a lot like the schedule (in CAD0 that dgcad is talking about.

Just for verification (before I take this idea to my CAD/BIM manager), does that sound like a good idea?

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dgcad

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Bronsart

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col9000

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Thanks for the advice. I tried doing a linked import from a cad file, but it seems to lose a lot of its formatting when I import it for some reason. I set up the text as 3 columns in cad, but in revit it appears as one huge paragraph. Do you know if there is some setting I should change?

Thanks

Colin

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Bronsart

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I am not sure what you are importing into Revit, but I've found it best to explode any multi-line text in CAD before importing it into Revit.  Sometime the text wraps different in Revit so it conflicts with other text or arrows.

If you are using a table in CAD, you probably should explode it to just lines & text.

Hope that helps...

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tim123

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Joined: Tue, Apr 12, 2005
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I would agree that the text in Revit is not as powerfull as it could be, but there are ways to have a fair amount of control.  If you set up a note block, you can have columns of text and control the formatting and grids and control the column widths on a sheet.  I can't think of a reason to do electrical legends in CAD and import them into Revit when all of the functionality is within Revit to do it faster - you can alter the look of the standard symbols if you need to, but they also have a lot of information with them.

With regard to the callouts, many items can just be dragged into a legend from the family section of the browser, where you have a choice of views for most items.  The items are parametric - we need to use the full power of Revit as much as possible.

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